Jack White has been chatting about his career in an in-depth interview with Dan Rather.
The singer sat down with journalist Dan Rather for an hour-long discussion on ‘The Big Interview’ television series.
The former White Stripes frontman admits he has doubts about his songwriting ability and grapples for musical inspiration, despite the success of his latest album Lazaretto.
Speaking about his music the singer said he is not a revivalist but his wants to bring what was beautiful in the past to the present.
White recalled telling Bob Dylan, “In a lot of ways, you guys had it so lucky in the 60s. All these recording techniques had never been tried before; the Civil Rights Movement was coming to a head, you had that to sing about; the Vietnam War. The whole world was changing… It was like shooting fish in a barrel to sing about those kind of songs.”
Equally it can be argued that there is plenty still to sing about nowadays, with political, racial and social unrest rife in society.
The singer continued, “Now it’s an age that’s a little more – I hate to label the generation now “entitled” – but the sense of entitlement that’s around nowadays seems to be something that bugs me enough to want to try and overcome it… I don’t see that beauty in the way that pop music is all recorded on computer and auto-tuned and presented in that really plastic way. And I guess I just do my best in whatever I do to try to defeat those ideas and present something that’s at least an attempt at getting at truth and getting at beauty.”
White also revealed his favourite rock song, “That’s really hard to say, but I really like The Stooges’ album Fun House.”
